State oil firm Saudi Aramco's crude output fell by a million barrels per day in 2009 from the previous year as the kingdom led Opec in making steep production curbs, data from Aramco showed on Tuesday.

Aramco's crude output was 7.9 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2009, the company said in an annual review released on Tuesday, down from 8.9 million bpd in 2008.

Opec pledged to cut output by 4.2 million bpd in late 2008 as global oil demand plummeted with slowing economic activity. Top oil exporter Saudi Arabia shouldered the biggest share of the cuts.

Aramco's crude exports fell to 5.65 million bpd in 2009, from 6.88 million bpd in 2008.

Capacity and output from the Neutral Zone shared by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia is excluded from Aramco figures.

Aramco added more than 2 million barrels per day of production capacity in 2009, the company said. It completed an expansion programme that took Aramco's capacity to 12 million bpd, boosting the kingdom's total capacity to 12.5 million bpd.

The biggest increment was from the 1.2 million bpd Khurais oilfield project, the biggest in Saudi history and the largest ever single addition to global oil supplies.

The expansion in capacity was completed as the economy slowed and the kingdom cut output, leaving Saudi Arabia sitting on around 4.5 million bpd of spare capacity, more than double the 1.5 million to 2.0 million bpd cushion it aims to keep to meet any surprise outages in global supply.

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that has significant spare capacity that can be brought into production swiftly if needed. The kingdom keeps the supply cushion as a matter of oil policy.

Aramco's recoverable oil and condensate reserves edged up to 260.1 billion barrels from 259.9 billion barrels stated in last year's review.

Gas reserves rose to 275.2 trillion cubic feet, Aramco said, up from 263 trillion cubic feet last year. It discovered two new gas fields in 2009, one named Sanaman and the other Sirayyan.

The 12.2 trillion cubic feet increase in reserves was much higher than the kingdom's stated aim of finding 3 to 7 trillion cubic feet per year in additional reserves.

Despite the fall in Aramco's crude production, gas output rose. The company pumped 8.6 billion cubic feet per day in 2009, up from 8.3 billion cfd in 2008.

With its crude capacity expansion completed and a comfortable supply cushion in place, Aramco has focused on developing gas production to meet rapidly rising domestic demand.

Most of the kingdom's gas output is associated with oil output, so when Saudi Arabia curbs crude production with Opec it loses some gas volumes. To boost output regardless of crude supply policy, the Gulf state is developing gas fields that are not associated with crude.

'By reaching 12 million bpd of oil production capacity, Saudi Aramco closed an illustrious chapter in its history, but this does not mean the story is over, just that another chapter has begun,' Aramco said in the review.

'We plan to expand gas production and processing capacities by 4.5 billion cfd by 2014, an increase of 40 per cent over current capacity.'    

Refined product output fell to 1.36 million bpd in 2009, down from 1.58 million bpd in 2008. Still, refined products exports rose to 409,000 bpd, from 362,000 bpd the year before.-Reuters